


somewhere far from what keeps us apart

by superfluouskeys



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/M, Flashbacks, Mutual Pining, The Fade
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-24
Updated: 2017-07-24
Packaged: 2018-12-06 06:41:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11595036
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/superfluouskeys/pseuds/superfluouskeys
Summary: The world comes back into focus, but everything is sickly green, strange, wrong.  Varric is here because he will not leave Hawke alone.





	somewhere far from what keeps us apart

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tigereyes45](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tigereyes45/gifts).



> Happy Hightown Funk!

The world was coming back into focus.  The ground beneath his feet was real and solid and unchanging, and the people surrounding him were real and solid and alive and not demons or abstract concepts.  But sounds were all murky and distorted, like his head was underwater, and he saw the Inquisitor, and he saw the Grey Warden, but he couldn't hear what they were saying.

"Where's Hawke?"

The Inquisitor was holding out her hand and the fade rift was twisting, the green receding, the fabric of the universe knitting itself back together, and _where was Hawke?_

"Varric, get back, I have to--" the Inquisitor's face, brows furrowed, eyes shining with--

"No."

"Someone had to stay--"

Varric's feet were moving without his permission.  He was speaking without hearing himself.  "No!" he heard a voice that sounded like his shouting.  "No, fuck you!"  Twisting, crackling, closing, the universe struggling to knit itself back together, and arms on either side trying to hold him back.  "What the fuck do you think you're doing?  I trusted you!  I fucking trusted you, and you--!"

Varric kicked whoever was holding him squarely in the shins and dove into the receding fade rift.  The universe shifted around him, whirred in his ears as though his head were going to explode, and he was sure he would die, or the sickly magic that poured out of these things would tear him to pieces, but he would not--would not!--just leave her in here.  Not after all this.  Not after he had been the one who...

Stillness.  Eerie silence.  Too bright to see anything.

Then, suddenly, overwhelming noise, incomprehensible movement.

The whispers were back, quiet echoes of old fears almost forgotten, piercing hisses of newer, more imminent dangers.  Varric's mind was sluggish, his body ached all over, and his limbs felt impossibly heavy.  The Fade did not agree with him--it was like the very atmosphere knew he didn't belong here.

The Nightmare was back, too--the real one, not the aspect--bigger and more monstrous than a mortal mind was meant to comprehend.  The movement was hard to track, all spidery legs and flying sparks and something small darting around them, little more than a flea by comparison.

It seemed an eternity before Varric was able to put together that the flea in question was Hawke, fighting with everything she had.

Varric scrambled to his feet, grappled with his crossbow and charged in after her.

Maker, he'd forgotten what it was like fighting with Hawke.  It was sort of like standing astride a natural disaster.  Lately he'd been thinking maybe he had overblown it in his mind, but no--he had never seen another mage who fought anything like she did.  It was like she reflected every combat style she'd ever witnessed, and now with the Fade swirling around her, she was almost as incomprehensible as the ancient horror she faced.

The nightmare managed to land a hit to both of them at once, and Varric felt the world tearing open again, and Hawke came flying to the ground near him--if such a thing as the ground existed here.  She was on her feet in an instant, but Varric couldn't bring his limbs to cooperate.

"Varric!"  Hawke was grabbing him by the arm, pulling, yelling, come this way, but his vision was dark and blurred around the edges, and he saw strange, old memories far more clearly than his present surroundings.

* * *

 

"Varric."

"Hm?"

"Don't look so glum, I know you'll miss me desperately."

He managed a feeble approximation of a chuckle, but couldn't quite bring himself to look her in the eyes.  _Do you have to leave?_ he wanted to say.  "This is gonna be hell on my second draft," he said instead.

"Yes, well, make sure you clear my good name after I'm dead at least," said Hawke.

Varric felt his insides twist horribly at the mere suggestion of it.  "How about you try not to die, instead?"

Hawke made a face.  "Sounds like a lot more work."

In spite of himself, this drew a small, genuine laugh from Varric, and at last he braced himself for the full force of her eyes.  He touched her face, and intended to do his level best not to linger too long there, but Hawke caught his hand in hers and pressed a kiss to his knuckles, and whatever he had intended outside of that seemed suddenly unimportant.

* * *

 

Varric came to as though from the dead, with a choking gasp and hands grasping at nothing.  His vision focused, but everything was sickly green, strange, wrong.  Not real.  The Fade.  Trapped in the Fade because Hawke... 

Hawke was on her feet just above him, pacing, eyes scanning over imaginary enemies.  He was here because he would not leave Hawke here alone.

"Hawke?"

"Varric."  Hawke frowned, then turned on him, blue eyes somehow even brighter against the hazy green of the Fade.  "Thank the Maker.  We're safe for the moment, I think."

"Hawke..."  _They were going to let you die.  They were going to leave you in here to..._

"Come now," she said.  The furrow of her brow deepened, and she reached down to pull him to his feet.  "We'd better get moving."

Varric allowed her to help him up, but her words made little sense to him.  "Moving," he echoed, shaking his head.  "Where?"

She offered him half of a mirthless smile and waved a hand dismissively.  "Anywhere but here?" she said lightly, but it came out thin and wavering.

He wanted to argue, but something about the tone of her voice stayed his tongue.  It occurred to him again how different she seemed from when last he'd seen her.  Instead, he nodded his silent assent and clapped her gently on the shoulder, and they started off in what was probably a random direction.

"What happened, Varric?  Didn't you get out in time?" Hawke asked him.  "I didn't think of the Inquisitor as careless."

"No, no, it wasn't like that, I just..."  He rubbed his shoulder, feeling suddenly awkward and exposed.

Bright blue eyes on him again, piercing, searching.  "You...came back," she said.

"C'mon, Hawke," he shrugged sheepishly.  "You know I wouldn't leave you short-handed."

Hawke looked like she both did and desperately did not want to say something, and she hesitated for what felt like a long time before she eventually returned his gentle shoulder clap and turned her attention to the endless expanse of nothingness that surrounded them.  "Well," she said, "I hope you like green."

They walked in silence for a moment before Hawke said, "What is this, the second time you've followed my sorry ass into the Fade?"

Varric almost laughed.  "Maker, don't remind me.  Poor kid--don't guess you know what happened to Feynriel?"

"He's in bloody Tevinter, I'm sure it's just peachy," Hawke scoffed.

"C'mon, you never wanted to visit the glowing Imperium?"

"Ancient magical horrors and a thriving slave trade?  I think I'll pass, actually, thanks."

"You're right, tromping around knee-deep in demon goo is way more fun."

"Just think, Varric, I could have been a magister."

Varric shrugged.  "Your accent's not far off--"

"Fuck you!"  Her look of mock-offense was strangely comforting, like she was still in there, hidden somewhere under the years of stress.

"That's the spirit," said Varric, "just combine aggressive mage with pompous asshole and you've got it!"

Hawke drew herself up to her full height and held her arms aloft.  "You dare speak to me, dwarf?  You dare even to look upon me?  Don't you know who I am?"

Varric nodded his approval.  "Spot on."

Hawke gave a little bow.  "Of course it is; I was channeling my mother."

They fell silent for a time after that, and the atmosphere seemed to feed on the tension that had dispersed and then swollen up again without warning.  The green fog started to take shape, to form various iterations of Leandra along their path.

At first Varric tried to keep his eyes straight ahead, whatever the fuck that meant, but then he heard Hawke starting to mutter under her breath, and turned to see that her eyes were firmly affixed on one of the Leandras, and he grasped desperately for any topic of conversation that might snap her out of it.

"So!  Since Minrathous doesn't call to you, where have you been, Hawke?  Seen anywhere interesting?"

Hawke twitched in response to his voice, stopped walking for a moment and squeezed her eyes closed.  "Anywhere interesting," she echoed slowly, then opened her eyes to find all of the Leandras had dissipated.  "Anywhere interesting."  She started to walk again, then, with a kind of affected gesture of her arm, she continued.

"Well, Varric, I suppose that depends on what you think is interesting.  For example, I hadn't until recently ever traversed a mountainous region to come upon an ancient fortress with a weird old elven name."

"Ha!  More elf shit in this Inquisition nonsense than you'd know what to do with Hawke."

"Really?  I figured it was just the bald fellow who loves demons or whatever."

"Nah, Chuckles is pretty harmless once you spend enough time around him," said Varric.  "His field of study is basically just sleeping in weird places."

"Isabela should take that up," Hawke quipped.  "She's a natural."  And Varric chuckled more out of a sense of familiarity than because it was actually funny.  In truth he couldn't quite put words to the relief he'd felt when Rivaini had turned up alive.  He'd been terrified of the day he got word that her remains had been found washed up on some distant shore.  Almost as terrified as by the prospect of...

"Don't suppose you...know what happened?  To the others."

Hawke was silent for awhile.  The Fade was starting to form shapes Varric was afraid to see.  "Aveline and Donnic are fine, I hear," she began.  "Merrill and Fenris..."  The Fade formed their shapes and Hawke faltered.  "I don't know.  There was a terrible fire in the alienage, and I know Merrill was leaving but I don't know if she got out in time.  Fenris?"  Hawke shook her head, and the shapes of Merrill and Fenris dissipated into so much smoke.  "I imagine he's still alive.  Or like to hope, perhaps."

Their images gazed at Hawke with the same doe eyes Varric remembered.  Back in the day he'd always assumed everyone was at least a little bit in love with Hawke.  Later on he'd wondered whether that might just be a thin guise for his own tragic fixation.  Now he was even less certain.

"After all these years, I have to ask...did anything ever happen?  With you and...I dunno, anyone?"

Hawke's first response was a breathy sort of chuckle, and she kept her eyes fixed on some imaginaty point ahead of her where, for all Varric knew, she might still be seeing the shadows of their lost companions.  "Varric, I'm shocked--don't you think I would have told you?"

Varric shrugged.  "We never really talked about that kind of thing."  Apart from a few drunken conversations that hadn't quite led anywhere useful, but Varric wondered whether Hawke even remembered them, whether they'd even meant anything to her with a clear head.

The shapes were materializing out of the fog again, but this time it was Hawke and Varric, Hawke and Varric, slowly surrounding them in slightly different iterations, and the memories Varric had neglected to mention aloud were beginning to overtake him.

* * *

 

Sometime in the aftermath of the Deep Roads disaster, Hawke began to make a habit of depositing herself upon his bed when she couldn't find him elsewhere.  He was usually up late writing in those days--that was back when he'd still carried a torch for the namesake of his beloved crossbow, and the idea of Hawke as a particularly interesting character study had just begun to take root--and she was feeling lost and lonely and directionless, and not dealing with it particularly well.

"What are you writing, Varric?" she asked him.

"A letter," he responded.

"Ooh, to whom?" Hawke pressed.

"A friend," he said, but for some reason the lie caught on his tongue, and of course, like the hunting bird who was her namesake, Hawke caught the slip immediately.

"A love letter!" Hawke cried, accompanied by a delighted flop upon his pillows.

"Whatever you want to believe, Hawke," Varric replied as flatly as he could manage.

But now Hawke had wriggled her way around to the foot of his bed, and was quite literally tugging at his sleeve.  "Come on, Varric!  How long have we known each other now, and I barely know anything about your super-secret personal life!  Are you writing to the real Bianca?"

Varric opened his mouth to respond, but hesitated like an idiot.

"Ha ha!" Hawke crowed, and flopped back onto his bed.  "I knew there was a real Bianca!  What are you writing to her?  How long have you been apart?  Are you still in love?"

And although Varric very desperately did not want to talk about this, and for some murky reason he especially did not want to talk about this with Hawke, this was the liveliest he had seen her in months, and he was loath to shut it down entirely.  He sighed heavily and contemplated what exactly he was willing to admit.

"If indeed there were a non-crossbow Bianca, and if I were writing her a letter..." Varric sighed again, "...well, it would be the last resort of a fool's heart.  In all likelihood, what we had is..." over, he couldn't bring himself to say just yet, "...in the past," he settled on, instead.  "But knowing that can't keep me from writing."

"What are you writing her about?  Have you told her you wish it weren't over between you?  How far away is she?"

"That's all you're getting out of me tonight, Hawke," said Varric, and then, recklessly, and without quite knowing why, he added, "and I'll expect a little quid pro quo."

"Ugh, fine," said Hawke with another dramatic flop on the bed.  "But it's nothing particularly exciting, Varric, I warn you.  Life in Lothering was a lot of hard work and hiding.  I had a few lovers here and there, but they...I..." she trailed off, and Varric felt compelled at last to look up from his writing desk.

This image Varric remembered more clearly than anything else, and in the Fade, it was like the rest of his room in the Hanged Man sort of tapered off at the edges.  Crystal clear was Hawke, sprawled out across Varric's bed, bright blue eyes affixed to the ceiling as she prepared to share something she felt deeply personal enough to match Varric's secret lost love.

"My sister, Bethany, fell in love once," she began, "when she was something like fourteen, which put me at around nineteen."  She smiled, just a little, at the memory, as though she could still see her sister clear as day before her.  "She was completely taken with this boy in town, made him little gifts and everything."  But then the smile faded abruptly, and all the colour seemed to drain from her face.  "When he found out she was a mage, he meant to drag her to the templars right then and there."

"Shit," Varric remarked, for lack of anything better to say.

"Fortunately he was just a kid, himself.  I threatened him...fairly graphically...and that was enough to scare him off.  But Beth was..."  Hawke sighed heavily, shifted onto her side and brought her knees up to her chest.

"And I get it," she continued after a moment.  "Loving someone is trusting them, at least a little bit, with some of the pieces of who you are.  If your love picks up a piece of you and calls it an abomination against the Maker?  I think I'd be devastated, as well."

"Come on, Hawke, there's..." but again, words caught in Varric's throat, and he could hear his heart beating in his ears, and why should it be so difficult to offer a few words of comfort to his friend, especially when the words were absolutely true?

"I mean..." he tried again.  "There's..."  But still the words were slow to form.  She'd cast her bright blue eyes upon him, wide, piercing, searching for what he wasn't saying, and Varric both did and desperately did not want to look away. 

"Lots of people...are going to love you," he managed at last.  He averted his eyes, returned his attention to the notes he'd been scribbling all night, and waved his hand vaguely as he grasped for the words he'd wanted to say before.  "There's...a lot...to love."

Hawke chuckled sadly.  "That's very sweet of you to choke out, Varric, but you never knew my sister.  She was the kindest person I ever knew, and everyone who met her adored her, with good reason."  She shifted in his pillows again, reaffixed her gaze upon the ceiling.  "If someone could do that to her...well.  What chance would I have of a kinder fate?"

* * *

 

The fog was growing thicker, heavier, colder.  Somehow the palpable chill roused Varric from the prison of his recollections enough to remember whatever reality existed for him outside of them.  Now the Fade was forming various iterations of Hawke, and he found himself entirely unable to discern the real one walking next to him from the dozens of aspects.

Hawke when she first arrived in Kirkwall, scruffy and hard-eyed and driven, Hawke looking half-dead in the Deep Roads, Hawke looking completely dead after the loss of her mother, Hawke looking warm and happy in the dim lighting of the Hanged Man, eyes bright and focused entirely on him, Hawke limping into Skyhold looking like a completely different person, a mere shadow of her former self so disparate that Varric wondered whether he'd imagined all the others.

Hawke collapsing next to him, contemplating each iteration of herself with an impassive face.

Varric sank to his knees next to her, offered a hand upon her shoulder, and she covered it with one of her own, but did not look at him.  She was looking at a shadow of herself, some amalgamation of traits that Varric had thrown together to make her less of a human and more of an archetype, and, not least, to disguise her, should certain forces have decided to give chase after the whole defying-the-templars incident.

"Hawke?"

"Hm."

"Are you still real?  Are you still here?"  Some iterations of Hawke disappearing, others reforming, taking new and monstrous shapes.  Hawke standing over the body of the Arishok with a gaping wound in her abdomen, eyes glowing with strange, horrible magic, snarling like a wild animal.  Was Hawke already gone?  Had he been wandering around with another aspect of the Nightmare all this time?

"I think so."  She took his hand between both of hers.  Real, solid, cold hands. Warmer than the foggy nothingness around them.  Warm enough to be alive. 

"Hawke?"

"Yes, Varric?"  Bright blue eyes cast upon him, too bright, too piercing.

He had to look away.  "Would it ever have worked between us?"

She squeezed his hand between hers.  "Sometimes I like to think so."

Varric felt his heart twist unhelpfully.  "Yeah?"

"Yeah."

"Huh.  Me, too."

It was growing impossibly dark now.  The fog had ceased to form Hawkes and was now billowing in thick clouds around where they knelt, closing in, suffocating.  The atmosphere knew they weren't meant to be here.

"Varric?"

"Hm."

"Thank you for coming back for me."

"C'mon, Hawke..."  He turned so he could face her, and hesitantly, reached for her face with shaking hands, though whether they were shaking from the cold or from the uncertainty of his own mind was anyone's guess.  "You know I wouldn't let you leave me short-handed out there."

There was a fraction of an urge, or a longing, or an inspiration, but the Fade captured it and twisted it, and suddenly it was no longer real, today Hawke with her hands on either side of his face, but nearly-a-decade-ago Hawke, somehow both sharper and softer, warm in the light of the Hanged Man, teasing him about...what was it exactly?  He'd almost forgotten everything except...

* * *

 

"Are you trying to get rid of me, Varric?"

"No!" Varric waved his hands in exasperation.  Hawke was in rare form that night.  She'd finally recovered from the strange fog they'd all been lost in after their expedition, she'd been able to give her mother the family estate she'd so longed for, and she'd quelled her drinking habit to a much more enjoyable level.  "I was just thinking, you know, what's holding you in Kirkwall after all this?'

"Fame, fortune, the thrill of Hightown?" said Hawke, straight-faced, and with a long sip of her ale.

Varric's response was a withering look.

"I think I'd make a wonderful politician, don't you?"

"Hawke."

"Viscount Hawke?" she gesticulated grandly.  "I could put a hit out on the current Viscount--I'm sure my old friends in the Red Iron would be happy to oblige."

"Hawke!" Varric whined, but he had to admit the thought of Hawke holding any sort of office was hilarious.

Hawke was beaming with the self-satisfaction that she had wrought such amusement, but there was a certain grimness that hung about her now, an edge to the lighthearted banter that hadn't always been so noticeable. 

She sobered then, and took Varric's face between her hands.  He was surprised and taken aback by the touch--she'd always been touchy, but there was that strange seriousness about her now that made this touch feel monumental.  A part of him felt like he should be waiting for the punch line, but maybe his own treacherous heart hoped none would come.

"Come now, Varric," she said, almost gently, "what would I do without my trusty dwarf?  I'd cry myself to sleep without you."  She leaned in, slowly, too slowly, and Varric felt his eyelids grow heavy of their own volition, and she planted a kiss upon his nose, and he didn't remember the rest of the conversation, only that he'd felt his heart sink into his stomach, and he'd suddenly been very tired and very irritable, and none of the jokes she tried to make thereafter could do a single thing to lighten his mood.

He remembered the way she glanced over her shoulder at him as he left early to go to bed, though.  There was hurt in her eyes, and confusion.  She understood that she'd hurt his feelings somehow, that he wouldn't want her to follow, but she didn't understand why, and...hell, maybe at the time, neither did he.

* * *

 

It was getting hard to breathe, but the memory and the reality felt the same in this respect.  Varric remembered now how tortured he'd been after that night, unable to understand the machinations of his own heart in response to such a simple exchange.  Hawke then and Hawke now were blurring and focusing, one after the other, and he and Hawke still knelt a breath apart, foreheads touching, gasping for air in the darkness.

"Do you remember...?" he started to ask, before he could stop himself.

"The night I kissed your nose?" Hawke finished for him, though, and it was at once a tremendous relief and a terrible discord to know that she might see in this place just as he did, or that he might see just as she did.

"Yeah.  That."

"I didn't know why you were upset," Hawke breathed. "I was always too afraid to ask."

"I thought you...for a minute, I thought..." but the words caught on his tongue, and he couldn't get enough air, and the fog was closing, closing...

"You wanted me to?"  She was so close now.  He could feel the faintest of warmth from her breath against his lips.

"I guess I didn't realize I did..." said Varric, slowly, "until I did, and you didn't."

Hawke let out a breathy little laugh.  "I always thought you barely tolerated me touching you at all."

"That's our Champion," Varric chuckled, softly, breathlessly.  "Eye for observation like the hawk she's named for, unless it's telling when someone is crazy about her."

Hawke's fingers curled into Varric's hair as she shared his breathless laughter.  "Do you suppose this is it, Varric?" she asked him, almost but not quite against his lips.

Varric closed the distance between them at long, long last.  He laced his fingers through her hair in kind and kissed her desperately.  He poured every hopeful thought, every spark of inspiration, every happy memory, every fibre of his being that had been so thoroughly touched by his personal champion, into her, and when at last he must gasp for air, he told her, with a ferocity he hardly remembered he could possess, "Oh, I doubt that, Hawke.  Time has taught me that whenever the situation looks like it's beyond hope, that's when I can count on you to come through."

Hawke began running her fingers through his hair, which she'd untied at some point, or perhaps it had come undone long ago.  "I think your book has gotten to your head at long last, Master Tethras," she said.

"Just because I didn't tell it exactly the way it happened doesn't mean I've forgotten, Hawke," he told her.  "In case you hadn't noticed, I tend to keep the best stories to myself."

He could feel Hawke's smile against his lips, and then, impossibly, he could see something again.  It was only a distant spark, light only in comparison to utter darkness, but it was _something_ , and that was a hell of a lot more than they'd had a moment ago.

There was a spark in Hawke's voice, too, when next she spoke, one that indicated she had noticed the something, too.  "What will you say when we get out of here?"

Varric was loath to separate himself from his proximity to Hawke, and if his muscles had been sore before, they were in agony now, but he made to stagger to his feet nonetheless, and dragged her up with him.  "The Champion of Kirkwall and the dashing dwarf with a heart of gold reunite for another adventure, a daring escape from the Fade, itself!"

Hawke leaned heavily upon his shoulders as she walked, but they were _walking_ , moving forward, and the spark in the distance seemed so real and so possible.  "They defeat the Nightmare in a glorious battle, wind their way through a maze of strange, otherworldly obstacles, and reminisce on the good old days for some laughs, of course," she amended.

The spark in the distance was growing closer, larger, brighter, enveloping them, and suddenly it was no longer in the distance at all.  "They come crashing back into the mortal world, battling demons and ancient horrors the whole way," he continued, but his grip on Hawke tightened as they stepped for what must be the hundredth time into some new unknown.

"But they both make it home safe and sound," Hawke continued, but her voice hitched just a little as light and the spark and tingle of magic surrounded them, "because neither would ever leave the other behind."

As it stood, they did indeed come crashing back into the mortal world, but it was nothing so glamourous as Varric might one day hope to put to paper.  It was more like fingers dug into the dirt and a feeling of constantly falling upward, stomachs lurching and eyes tearing up with the force of the Fade ejecting them, sun too bright and wind too crisp to tolerate, and finally, when they'd ascertained that they wouldn't die immediately, each grasping for the other's hand in the grass of some unknown place.

"Varric."

"Hm."

"Was any of that real?"

"I...think so."

"Does..." Hawke winced, groaned, and shifted.  Her grip on his hand tightened.  "Does that mean you still love me?"

The surprised half-chuckle that escaped him hurt like hell, but it was also kind of worth it.  "Didn't have to drag my ass through the Fade for that, Hawke."

Hawke shifted around to lie on her back next to him, and he managed to find a comfortable position on his side so that he could wrap an arm around her while they rested.  The sickly fogginess of the Fade was already receding, but it was like something had taken a bite out of them both on the way through.  They'd have to move soon.  Varric didn't have to be a creepy mage to know the Veil had to be thin here to let them through, and neither of them was in any condition to be fighting a horde of demons.

"I dunno," said Hawke lightly.  "All things considered, it seemed very efficient.  Ten years without so much as an 'I don't dislike it when you touch me', then one life-threatening experience and here we are."

"If you weren't wounded, I'd tell you to fuck off," said Varric, but he was laughing in spite of himself.

"No, you wouldn't."

"Try me."

"You wouldn't, because you know why?"

With a sigh that was equal parts fond exasperation and relief from the ebbing pain, Varric propped himself up on one elbow to look down upon Hawke.  She was sprawled out at odd angles the way she'd been when she told him she thought no one could love her, and Maker, it was such a relief not to be overwhelmed by that old memory when this moment unfolding before him was so much brighter, so much warmer, so much better.  Now, in this moment, she was glowing in sunlight filtered through trees, with a smile threatening her lips and that old mischievous glimmer lighting up her eyes.

"Why?" he challenged.

"Because," Hawke said slowly, as though in deep contemplation, and she studied him for a moment before she continued.  A familiar anxiety found its way into the pit of Varric's stomach.  There was that strange look about her, the one that made him feel like a punch line must be coming, but hope that maybe, just this once, it wouldn't.

In a movement so quick and so smooth that all Varric could feel was disoriented, Hawke looped a leg over his and situated herself on top of him, ostensibly without any harm to either of them.  She rested her arms on either side of his head in the grass and leaned in, slowly, too slowly.  "Because if you told me to fuck off," she continued, "I wouldn't do this."

This time, she kissed him on the lips. 

In that moment, Varric found that instead of old memories, his senses were overwhelmed by new possibilities.  He'd already noticed that the old wound from the Arishok's axe was flaring up on Hawke's abdomen, so he held her waist cautiously and dreamed of the day when he might hold her against him with all his strength.  He was keenly aware of her legs on either side of his hips, and longed for the day when there might be far fewer clothes between them.

There was something uniquely precious about this moment, so warm and so real after such a strange departure from reality, and Varric was not eager to part with it, but the fact remained that if they weren't already in peril, they would be soon enough.

So, it was with great reluctance that Varric murmured against Hawke's lips that they ought to be going soon, and it was with a small amount of humour that, when Hawke asked him where they ought to be going, he answered, with a vague gesture of his hand, "Anywhere but here?"

"Is this a good enough ending for our Fade adventure, Varric?" Hawke wondered as they set off to find a path to follow.

Varric squeezed her hand and affixed his eyes upon some imagined point among the trees that stretched out before them. "I was sort of hoping it'd be more like a beginning."


End file.
